• danah boyd’s Best of Apophenia
  subcategorized roundup of her “essays that are most interesting to newcomers interested in social media”, a review form that I predict we’ll see more of. Bravo.
  (tags: metastuff)

There’s stuff I admire but don’t aspire to do myself, and video blogging is in that realm. This morning my blogstream presents me with abundant evidence of yet another of those tectonic shifts in Web presentation that redefines the possibilities of the medium. The conjunction of these three seems to me like new territory, and I’m certainly gonna enjoy the ride:

Better Bad News on Art

Mark Cuban’s little world

Music instruction mashup

• FlickrShow
  a hosted service to display Flickr photosets
  (tags: photography ajax javascript)
• Table of Condiments
  arrayed as a Periodic Table, by go-bad time
  (tags: food time)

There’s an interesting exchange on blogging and academic careers in the most recent issue of The Chronicle Review, centered on Yale’s non-hiring of Juan Cole, but provoking thought on Career in a more general sense. Juan Cole’s response is a good starting place, but the seven linked pieces (“Related materials”) are bones worth chewing upon.

Christina Wodtke’s Elements of Style for Designers is a useful reminder of things one might choose to do, or not, drawn directly from Strunk and White’s ave atque vale list of admonishments. As I read through the list, I reflected wincingly that I regularly and wilfully violate most of those injunctions for habits that lead to Good Writing, as many antiprescritivist postings at Language Log suggest I may, if I like.

• Map Builder
  “Rapid mashup development tool for Google and Yahoo maps”
  (tags: mashup visualization geospatial)

he sez:

why trust building the “first mile” of the Net to people who never wanted it in the first place, who have always felt threatened by it, who can imagine their customers as nothing other than “consumers” of one-way “content”, and who want to create scarcities and insert billing valves everywhere they can? Because they’re the only ones in a position to do it? That’s not a good enough reason. It’s also not true.

The phone and cable companies will be the only ones in a position to do it if we let them lobby that privilege into law. That’s their real agenda, and that’s the important story here. And it’s a lot bigger than Net Neutrality.

• fastfoodmaps.com
  empirical answers to long-running questions
  (tags: food mashup geospatial)

The ancient roots of passive avoidance over at Language Log has either everything or nothing to do with the tragedical unwindings in the Levant. For a moment I thought that lexis eiromeneand lexis katestrammene were on a different plane altogether from the bombast and dissembling, (akin to “Here’s to pure mathematics, may it never be any use to anybody.”), but there’s something Hemingwayish and unforesightful about the various actors in the current drama.

Don’t miss the diagram at the end, and it’s worth meditating upon the statement “Hemingway gives a physical description of a journey through a specific landscape, while Johnson offers an abstract discussion of the reasons for valuing older works over newer ones.”

I’ve decided to try to follow the horrors of the news stream via a conventional Web page, mostly for my own purposes in sorting it (and what I think about it) all out later. Each item is too fragmentary for me to blog sensibly, and there’s already too much ill-informed blogventing out there.